Tagged: health equity

Judy Lubin, an adjunct professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University, says that current research shows that over 50 percent of a community’s health is determined by social factors. For instance, recent studies stress that one’s neighborhood is a strong determinant of well-being. The difference in life expectancy between St. Louis’s wealthiest and poorest zip codes is at least 12 years.

(AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

Lubin notes that this environment-centered way of thinking has roots in the advent of public health more than a century ago, when officials focused on improving residents’ environment through sanitation to stop the spread of communicable diseases. Scholars of color, particularly black scholars, have also long recognized the strong link between environment and health. W.E.B. DuBois, for example, chronicled the social factors that led to the ill health of African Americans in a Philadelphia neighborhood in 1899’s The Philadelphia Negro.

Yet for much of the twentieth century, many public health leaders emphasized individual control over well-being. A fixation on diet, exercise, and other life choices made good health the result of virtue and poor health a personal failing. While an individual’s choices certainly play a role in their health, Lubin says that understanding patients’ social contextsis critical to advancing the medical profession. Read more at CityLab

The recent spate of police shootings — leaving two black men dead on opposite ends of the country — inspired a familiar response from lawmakers across the United States, many of whom called for policy changes and powerful legislation. However, a growing number of human rights advocates are pushing officials to address this kind of racial violence from an entirely different angle: Public health. Read more at ThinkProgress [July 2016]

CURE’s Dr. Judy Lubin’s analysis of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and its potential for improving access to care for the Latino population is featured in the Spring 2014 issue of the Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy. An academic, non-partisan policy journal housed in the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, the HJHP is devoted to interdisciplinary scholarship on politics and policy issues facing the Latino communities in the United States.

Dr. Lubin’s article, Inclusion and Exclusion of Latinos in the Affordable Care Act: Challenges and Opportunities for Achieving Health Equity, examines outreach strategies and various components of the health law to assess its ability to reduce and prevent the exacerbation of health inequities. (more…)

In her latest Leading Voices blog, PSC president Judy Lubin, MPH, discusses the opportunity to reduce health disparities through comprehensive health reform.

She notes “Since as far back as 1899, W.E.B. Du Bois documented racial health disparities and their link to poverty and discrimination. Today, we have made few advances in addressing what Martin Luther King, Jr, called the “most shocking and inhumane” of all forms of inequality.”

“Access to a primary care doctor and screenings to prevent or catch health conditions before they worsen is a critical part of reducing these disparities,” she adds.

PSC has worked extensively in the area of health disparities, working with national health and policy organizations to improve the health of women and people of color.